


Dawn Goes Down to Day

by draculard



Category: A Coming of Age - Timothy Zahn
Genre: Basically just all the adults and their thoughts on Transition, Character Study, Child Abuse, Gen, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, Yerik Martel Backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-19 10:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20329390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Every adult on Tigris has experienced Transition, and every adult worries for the pre-teens in their care.





	Dawn Goes Down to Day

There’s no such thing as a nice fagin, but Martel does a good job of pretending. When he was a boy, the Catholic Church still held some way over the inhabitants of Tigris, and children were allowed to attend the Sunday Mass; some pre-teens even earned extra points as altar servers. Martel still remembers the priest’s grace and beneficence well enough to imitate it. 

Not that he was an altar boy, of course  — nor was his priest a real priest. Martel has been studying fagins since he was five years old, and he learned quickly that the best way to protect himself was to help as much as possible, to devote the entirety of his mind to his fagin’s problems, to new, more lucrative strategies, to predicting his opponent’s next move. To use his teekay only as his fagin wished; to open his body up to his master’s wishes, no matter the discomfort or pain.

He sees that same capability in Axel, and he finds himself responding to it the same way his own fagin did. Discouragement, insults, and bullying juxtaposed with a healthy mix of praise and temptation.

_ Do what I say and you’ll be a priest yourself someday,  _ Martel says.  _ You’re my best acolyte. _

And the same day he says,  _ Thinking isn’t your strong suit, Axel. Best leave it to me. _

It isn’t personal  — he likes Axel. He respects any boy gutsy enough to plan a betrayal, and he remembers his own boyhood well enough to know that’s what Axel is doing. The boy’s mix of daring and cunning is admirable; it’s also dangerous. 

He likes to think that by putting Axel in his place, he’s making his own, long-dead fagin proud.

That thought puts a lump in his throat.

* * *

Many of Gavra’s favorite classmates committed suicide after Transition. The Hive system was looser back then, the rules less stringent. There were plenty of options for kids who didn’t have many points; there were better support systems, fewer prohibitions on parent-child interactions after absorption into the Hive. It was easier to sneak out of dorms at night, to relieve one’s tension by meeting one’s friends and making mischief.

Still, though things were better then, Gavra remembers how it felt to come to school in the morning and see her best friend’s desk was empty. She remembers taking a dull knife to her wrist and watching it ooze blood for hours, sitting in the communal showers and letting it mingle with the water, watching it trickle down the drain.

She’d assumed, of course, that death would come more quickly for her; after an hour or so, she adjusted her expectations and thought maybe another girl would stumble across her and call for help, and then at least Gavra would be taken to a hospital and forced to talk to doctors, who wouldn’t let her go until she was happy again, or at least knew how to deal with the fact that she would never be able to fly.

Neither situation came to pass. In the end, she wrapped the wound in gauze from a first-aid kit in the bathroom and went back to her room, where her roommate, absorbed in homework, had not noticed she was gone. Her arm itched and ached for weeks; she wore sweaters for years, even during Barona’s mild summers. 

Today, she still has a scar on the inside of her arm, pale and thick but only about two inches long. Would she have tried to kill herself if, like Lisa, she had an older friend to rely on, someone to give her a headstart in reading? She’d tried to learn by herself once, by stealing a book from the library at night  — an offense which almost lost her all her points (but things were less strict then). She’d been unable to parse the letters alone, without instruction, in the single night before she was caught. 

Lisa is older than Gavra was. She has friends who can help her, a roommate who notices when she’s gone and even thinks to tell the Senior. She has a tenacity Gavra never really possessed.

Still, Gavra decides not to sharpen the kitchen knives. 

* * *

Stanford Tirrell, unfortunately, was a humorless child. He was hyperaware of Transition even as an Eight, and his awareness only heightened with every passing year; it was hard to maintain any sort of glee with that sort of cloud looming over his head.

Nowadays, he likes to think he’s better. Maybe he doesn’t laugh at the other detectives’ jokes, but at least he smiles at Tonio’s. At least he plays along. He thinks maybe that’s the best thing he can do.

A lot of police righthands fail to join the force after Transition. Every righthand learns this at orientation their first year; they hear it again, constantly, if they decide to extend their training past that. What they don’t hear, and what police are careful not to tell them, is that many former righthands never get the choice.

Suicide rates are high in teenagers, after all. Sometimes, during long shifts or in the middle of a case, Tirrell looks at his own righthand  — exhausted but smiling, irritated from lack of sleep but pushing through it to make jokes  — and thinks,  _ Not Tonio. He doesn’t have it in him. _

Then he interrogates himself, inevitably: What doesn’t Tonio have in him? Is he missing the suicidal impulse, is that what Tirrell means? He’s too optimistic, too healthy; he doesn’t have a morose bone in his body. Or does he mean that Tonio doesn’t have it in him to join the force?

He tells himself that both can be true, but there’s a part of him that buys the Police Academy brainwash, that thinks perhaps Tonio’s softness, his sympathy, his humor is exactly what puts him at risk, is precisely what makes Tirrell keep a wary eye on him at all times. Upbeat people always snap, in his experience. They either snap or they don’t, and when they don’t it’s because that upbeat personality was a facade.

_Don’t let that be true,_ Tirrell tells himself, as if he has any control over it.

As if he has any control over anything at all.

* * *

Colin Brimmer hits puberty late, at age fourteen. This is how the injections are supposed to work; if he were a normal kid, on a normal path, then he would most likely start Transition a year from now, with full loss of power coming at sixteen.

Jarvis can’t decide, even now, whether that would be best. 

Colin still doesn’t know who his father or mother is, though he still, according to his roommate, mutters the name Miribel Oriana in his sleep. He doesn’t know what that means; he recognizes Jarvis, of course, and calls him Matt; he remembers their long vacation in the woods. He even remembers woodlore, and when Jarvis prompts him  — just for fun, he tells Colin  — Colin remembers what berries are okay to eat, and how to prepare a fish for roasting, and how to build a lean-to with or without teekay.

“We ought to go back sometimes,” Colin tells him. “It was fun.”

All Jarvis can do is give him a watery smile and duck his head to hide the expression on his face.

“I’d like that,” he says when he feels capable of speech. Colin’s Senior says he’s been having mood swings  — typical teenage mood swings, that’s all, but now Colin is the oldest and strongest boy in the Hive. He imagines a weekend alone with his son in that cabin  — impossible now, but he imagines it  — blissful and idyllic, with the smell of conetrees wafting to them on the mountain air. 

He imagines Colin throwing a teenage temper tantrum when it’s just the two of them alone up there.

He imagines how the parents of the Lost Generation must have felt when their children killed them and he thinks,  _ No more. This is how it has to be. _

“I’d like that,” he says again, and when he looks up, smiling, Colin is smiling back.


End file.
